Conventionally, many manufacturers, including electric appliance and automobile makers, produce a variety of products in which electric systems, such as electric or electronic circuits, are used. Further, provided in correlation with these products are service manuals that furnish detailed information for use as a reference for the inspection or the maintenance and repair of the products. Ordinarily, such service manuals are supplied as printed matter, but recently, digitized service manuals (electronic service manuals), which can be browsed using PCs (Personal computers), are increasingly being provided.
Multiple technical drawings, such as circuit diagrams and board diagrams, are inserted in the service manuals. Required for the technical drawings, which include circuit diagrams and board diagrams, are means for arbitrarily enlarging, reducing or moving them during browsing. Therefore, for the electronic service manuals, the use of a vector graphics data format is desired, and for this, the most common vector graphics data format, PDF (Portable Document Format), is employed.
While most electronic service manuals are those obtained by directly digitizing the printed matter for the service manuals, there are also electronic service manuals for which a hyperlink, for coupling data, is embedded at a predetermined location so that the display of a circuit diagram, for example, can be quickly changed to display the caption for the circuit diagram.
Furthermore, in patent document 1, disclosed below, is a parts search system wherein a server and a user terminal are connected across a network, and wherein when the server receives a product or parts search request issued by the user terminal, the server transmits to the user terminal information that is related to a requested product or part.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-99550
However, for an electronic service manual wherein a hyperlink is embedded for coupling data, an electronic service manual producer must designate in advance data to be coupled, and moreover, must embed a hyperlink for coupling the data. At present, where there are service manuals for a large variety of products and an extensive number of parts are included in the service manuals, an enormous amount of labor is required to embed hyperlinks in these parts, and the embedding process is very difficult.
Furthermore, this hyperlink is provided as a very fixed one. For example, especially for a PDF file, when URL information such as a search site is embedded using a hyperlink, the URL information can not be changed unless special software for PDF processing is employed. Further, since a keyword, for example, can not be transmitted even when a link is connected to a search site, it is impossible, by means of conventional hyperlink embedding, for information concerning each part to be searched for in a search site. That is, since it is impossible through the embedding of a hyperlink for information concerning each part to be searched for in a plurality of search sites and the site of a parts database, and since changes in a setup, by a user, is also limited, the usability of a conventional electronic service manual is very poor.
A part search system disclosed in patent document 1 is a system wherein images, based on a parts list or a service manual, are browsed by using a user terminal, and the location of a search requested part is narrowed down in accordance with an instruction given using a mouse, and wherein an enlarged image of a location designated by a user using the mouse and detailed information therefor are provided by a server, so that the search operation initiated by the user is supported. Therefore, in no way is an idea expressed that useful information for parts in a circuit or on a board can be obtained by employing a search site on the Internet or at the site of a parts database.